The first version of the Department of BFA Design's website included the an experimental feature called PLAYSPACE. BFA Design is an undergraduate department of the School of Visual Arts in New York City that encompasses Advertising, Graphic Design, Motion Graphics, and 3D Design.

The PLAYSPACE is an experimental art gallery that reimagines the traditional gallery experience for a purely digital space. It experiments with new ways of showing artwork by leveraging several unique characteristics of digital space that are simply not available in a traditional gallery experience - such the ability to rotate objects, interact with objects, and display a near infinite number of objects. This gallery allowed users to toggle between viewing constellations of images in 3D space and isolating individual images in a traditional 2D viewing experience.

The aim of PLAYSPACE was to use cutting-edge tools invoke a sense of mystery and provoke a desire to explore this new way of looking at imagery online. The creation of such a unique and high-tech environment was also motivated by a desire to show the Department as being at the forefront of internet and interactive design technology.

This gallery was part of the initial design of the Department's website which launched in 2008 and remained until 2010, when it was redesigned to this. The initial design employed a CMYK color scheme both as a way of paying homage to the Department's print-based roots as well as to push the envelope by taking CMYK into digital space. In addition to giving the site a fresh, unique and bold look, the color scheme is also semantic - each color signifies a type of element: Cyan = link, Magenta = title, Yellow = image/multimedia, Black = text (screenshots below).

The PLAYSPACE was scrapped during the redesign process where there was a greater emphasis on usability and a desire to move away from Flash. It still exists online, but has not been maintained since 2010. It was originally written in Processing and exported as an applet, but was rewritten for performance reasons using the Papervision library for Actionscript 3 (Flash).

The Department of BFA Design is part of the School of Visual Arts in New York City.